It would be difficult to prove but a very good circumstantial case can be made. See the relevant sections of Carl Sagan's DHW, psychologist Robert Bartholomew's UFOs on the parallel between the airship and flying-saucer manias--both the products of media hoaxes, and other rational, psychosocial accounts of the origin of the "UFO" collective delusion.

Writer John Keel's article "The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers" makes the case, crediting Ray Palmer with the creation of flying-saucer mania, bootstrapping on the Shaver Mystery sensation he had created in AMAZING Stories magazine. In lively AMAZING/Shaver Mystery fan discussion forums, editor Palmer promoted the paranoid "hidden world" mythology created in the stories of writer Richard Shaver as really existing inside the Earth. Soon after the 1945 publication of "I Remember Lemuria" (and the detonations of atomic bombs) the once nearly defunct ZD pulp suddenly had 500K readers. Ray Palmer would credit Shaver with inventing the idea of flying saucers, but it was Palmer who was obviously the master of this sort of yellow journalism that brought Shaver's insane idea to the world--just as fanciful newspaper hoaxes had been responsible for various airship manias.

The smoking gun here is the second of the Palmer hoaxes, the so-called Maury Island Mystery. Palmer sent Ken Arnold--now in Palmer's employ if he wasn't already--to investigate Fred Crisman's amazing story of a malfunctioning flying disk spewing radioactive slag and aircraft aluminum, followed by warnings from mysterious non-human men in black to keep silent about what he had seen. But Crisman was a Shaver Mystery fan who had corresponded with Palmer and at least one of his letters--claiming experience in the "hidden world"--had been published in AMAZING. Crisman wasn't keeping quiet of course, he was doing exactly the opposite: feeding flying-saucer hysteria in anticipation of FATE's January 1948 premier issue.

Alexander Mebane of New York's Civilian Saucer Intelligence, an early no-nonsense, fact-oriented "UFO" report investigation group, has said Arnold's story was a Palmer-engineered FATE promotion hoax; cyberpunk science-fiction writer John Shirley arrived at the same conclusion independently--as did this "UFO" debunker. I had heard Klass's meteors explanation, Kottmeyer's swans and Easton's reinterpretation of it as pelicans. All well intended certainly but all too literal when there is a much better explanation that considers all of the evidence and in its proper historical context.

Thanks for asking! And enjoy reading; I especially recommend Bartholomew's book and the (John Rimmer) Magonia archives online.

The psychosocial hypothesis (PSH) of "UFO" reports is a tripartite destroyer of the "UFO" collective delusion: Sheaffer/Oberg's Null hypothesis of reports; the history of the myth and delusion as an easily understandable cultural phenomenon and very obvious product of the human imagination (and a conceptual absurdity); and the biological and astronomical implausibility of the ETH.

The flying-saucer myth and "UFO" collective delusion is so easily and completely debunkable because it is composed of utter bunk!

1. Good science is indeed usually revealed in peer-reviewed journals, once its underlying “paradigm” becomes accepted (see the work of Thomas Kuhn). But when some new paradigm is not yet accepted, then new results are almost never revealed in academic journals.

As prior examples, please see for example meteorites, dinosaurs, continental drift, or DNA itself (discovered in 1870, but not recognized as the gene until 1960, because the underlying academic paradigm was that all genes had to be made of protein). Gregor Mendel likewise published in 1860, but his work on inheritance did not fit into a currently accepted academic paradigm, so it was not re-discovered until 1910 when the paradigm changed.

In this case, “alien implants” certainly have not been accepted yet as a new academic paradigm, which members of Harvard or Peterhouse discuss while they are having morning coffee, or afternoon tea and scones, and that is why Roger (and others) have to report their high-quality research work outside of standard academic journals, say to the National Press Club in Washington DC.

2. No one is trying to “fool” anyone. Roger attended a UFO meeting, and someone was showing x-rays from a whole family who had a terrifying e.t. sighting in Texas. They were all highly traumatized afterwards, with nearly complete loss of memory for 12 hours: what really happened there?

Several members of that family now had anomalous metallic objects under their skin, which were not subject to the usual bodily rejection mechanism for foreign bodies. Hence it was of some scientific concern to ask: what are those objects? If you have any other plausible, informed explanation that will fit the experimental field observations and laboratory data, then I am sure that the investigators will be glad to hear it.

3. Finally, some of you emphasize that “truth comes from academic journals”, but then you cite Wikipedia as a primary and reliable source.

The editorial or authorship biases on Wikipedia are well known, and it certainly cannot be used as a reliable source of information in all (or most) cases. Each article there depends on how knowledgeable and objective the author hpapens to be individually. Nor in many cases is accurate corrective editing allowed.

“True knowledge is much easier pretended to than acquired” (John Locke, 1690).

Methinks 2 things:

1) good science is usually revealed in journals, not Las Vegas press conferences. (Oh, I know, I know…it’s because of all those nasty conspiracies keeping him from publishing!) 2) Roger Leir (dyslexia and a relaxed attitude toward spelling could come in handy right now) must have watched the Amazing Randi’s “psychic surgery” video. Trouble is, he used it as a tutorial on how to fool people, not how to avoid being fooled.

“say www . alienscalpel.com/press.html where you can see the careful scientific studies of Dr. Alex Moser, presented recently in Washington D.C. at the National Press Club.”

I saw no (zero, nada, zilch) “scientific studies” on that website. Where are the links to the peer-reviewed journals? A press-club briefing is not even the same as a scientific paper. Where are the independent studies of the materials Roger Leir claims are alien in origin?

This is from Wikipedia:

“As with UFO subjects in general, the idea of “alien implants” has seen very little attention from mainstream scientists because of a lack of verifiable evidence. American podiatrist Dr. Roger Leir claims to have recovered about a dozen such implants from people’s bodies. He claims that these implants have unusual characteristics, including emitting radio signals, and moving independently under subjects’ skin. Also notable are his claims that the implants do not cause any type of inflammatory reaction from the surrounding tissue, something which is impossible by modern medical standards. They are also apparently made of an unknown metal. These claims have not been independently verified.“

So, to put it simply, until Roger Leir allows his evidence to be verified by real scientists, I see no reason to accept his claims.

Oh, I would also like to mention that any website with picture of little grey men loses all serious credibility from a scientific standpoint. It may be entertainment, just like his several books are probably also very entertaining, but they would hardly be classified as scientific.

Got any others?